Observations on Petrus Christus

Abstract

Recently an article appeared by Mrs. Lola B. Gellman which presented a reconstruction of a triptych by Petrus Christus.¹ The center panel of this altarpiece represents the Death of the Virgin, now in San Diego; the wings, showing St. John the Baptist and St. Catherine, each in a landscape, belonged to the Berlin Museum but were destroyed in the Flackturm fire, in 1945 (Fig. 1).² Although the attribution of the three panels to Petrus Christus, first made by Friedlander (1946), was later challenged by some of the leading authorities in the field of early Netherlandish painting, and although the fact that they belong together was seemingly never noticed, both points have long seemed quite obvious to me, and I proposed the same reconstruction as Mrs. Gellman in the fall of 1962, in a lecture course and a seminar conducted at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.³ However, the conclusions I derived from this contribution to the oeuvre of Christus differ considerably from those of Mrs. Gellman, and, in this paper, I shall discuss them and some connected important problems concerning Robert Campin, the dating of the early Eyckian illuminations in the Turin–Milan Hours and the artistic origins of Conrad Witz.